Disappearing iTunes Store movies: case closed?

Those unexplained movie disappearances from the iTunes Store have been …

Earlier this week, questions arose over the mysterious disappearance of certain movies from the iTunes Store. Today we have the answer—sort of. People first noticed the phenomenon when movies they "bookmarked" (you can pseudo-bookmark items by dragging them from the iTunes Store into a playlist in iTunes) were later nowhere to be found when they went back to rent or buy the films. The first thought was that Apple had simply moved the movies from the section of the store that the users had "bookmarked," but this later proved to be untrue. The movies were just gone.

Needless to say, people were confused and aggravated. Speculation arose that it was some sort of licensing issue, even though the movies weren't all from the same studio. (Licensing issues tend to be a good bet whenever things like this happen.) The folks at CNet managed to get confirmations out of spokespeople from both Netflix—where users are having similar issues—and Apple that movies are being pulled due to licensing conflicts.

According to the article's explanation, pay-per-view and "premium" TV channels provide a much larger revenue stream for content owners than either Apple's media store or Netflix. What it seems to come down to is the fact that channels like Cinemax or Showtime don't want movies they paid big bucks to play over and over to become available on iTunes or Netflix, and studios like Columbia or Warner Brothers aren't going to argue.

According to the numbers CNet obtained, digital downloads are a mere 0.06 percent of studio revenue, leading us to believe that it will be quite some time before this practice is changed. It also seems that, while licensing issues are at the heart of it all, some of those movies could be coming back to the iTunes Store after all.